`What exactly do you do?["] is a frequent question to journalists at The Irish Times on the Web, and a difficult one to answer.

Ours is a small department, and thus in some ways has more in common with a magazine or regional newspaper than a large national newspaper: journalists must be able to turn their hand to a wide range of skills, from writing, sub-editing, commissioning and web design to technical work and even customer support.

My day usually starts at 10 a.m., when I check over that morning's online edition of the newspaper, which has been "live" since the end of the night shift at 4 a.m. Then I start replying to the email messages which have already begun to arrive from readers in different parts of the world.

These emails provides an invaluable source of feedback from readers - free market research, in effect - but also involves some rather impractical requests, such as: "Please send me all the information you have on Northern Ireland since 1920 for a research paper I'm doing at High School . . ."

At 11 a.m. I attend the first of three daily news conferences at which the shape of the next day's edition is discussed by journalists from the various sections of the newspaper. Throughout the rest of the day general chores include monitoring our various discussion sites, at all times keeping an eye and ear out for breaking news. When a major news story breaks during the day, we publish a "News Update" to keep Irish people around the world abreast of developments.

On certain days I write one or other of our daily online columns, about the Dublin entertainment scene and the Irish weather, and start formatting stories from some of the early pages of the next day's newspaper; the Features page, for example, would generally be finished by the afternoon.

The night shift begins at 8 p.m. and is characterised by a great deal of coffee and very little conversation, as the pressure builds in advance of the publishing deadline at 4 a.m. Working on PCs connected to the newspaper's main computer system, a team of three journalists builds an interactive version of the following morning's paper. This is accomplished by accessing the stories onscreen - after they have been sub-edited by journalists in the main newspaper - dressing them up in HTML (the computer language which makes pages accessible on the Web), editing headlines and photos to fit the new space and weaving everything together using "hyperlinks".

Since coming into being just over four years ago as a skeleton service for expatriates, The Irish Times on the Web has expanded to include a host of complementary sites catering for special interests and covering major political and cultural events.

Increasingly the content of these sites is generated within our department (as opposed to being lifted from the print edition), which means fewer graveyard shifts and more creative work. Hence most of my time is devoted to planning, commissioning, writing for and managing these special sites.

The Irish Times on the Web www.irish-times.com